Types of phrases

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Prepared and Printed by: Mr. Angelito T. Pera
Majorship: English Language
Focus: English 14 (Structure of English Language)
For Reference and Instructional Purposes
TYPES OF PHRASES
A phrase is a group of related words (within a sentence) without both
subject and verb. For example, He is laughing at the joker.
A phrase functions as a noun, verb, adverb, adjective or preposition in a
sentence. The function of a phrase depends on its construction (words it
contains). On the basis of their functions and constructions, phrases are
divided into various types i.e. noun phrase, verb phrase, adverb phrase,
adjective phrase, appositive phrase, infinite phrase, participle phrase
and gerund phrase.
NOUN PHRASE
A noun phrase consists of a noun and other related words (usually
modifiers and determiners) which modify the noun. It functions like a noun ina
sentence.
A noun phrase consists of a noun as the head word and other words
(usually modifiers and determiners) which come after or before the noun. The
whole phrase works as a noun in a sentence.
Noun Phrase = noun + modifiers (the modifiers can be after or before
noun)
Examples.
He is wearing a nice red shirt. (as noun/object)
She brought a glass full of water. (as noun/object)
The boy with brown hair is laughing. (as noun/subject)
A man on the roof was shouting. (as noun/subject)
A sentence can also contain more noun phrases.
For example. The girl with blue eyes bought a beautiful chair.
PREPOSITIONAL PHRASE.
A prepositional phrase consists of a preposition, object of preposition(noun
or pronoun) and may also consist of other modifiers.

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e.g. on a table, near a wall, in the room, at the door, under a tree
A prepositional phrase starts with a preposition and mostly ends with a noun
or pronoun. Whatever prepositional phrase ends with is called object of
preposition. A prepositional phrase functions as an adjective or adverb in a
sentence.
Examples.
A boy on the roof is singing a song. (As adjective)
The man in the room is our teacher. (As adjective)
She is shouting in a loud voice. (As adverb)
He always behaves in a good manner. (As adverb)
ADJECTIVE PHRASE.
An adjective phrase is a group of words that functions like an adjective in a
sentence. It consists of adjectives, modifier and any word that modifies a noun
or pronoun.An adjective phrase functions like an adjective to modify (or tell
about) a noun or a pronoun in a sentence.
Examples.
He is wearing a nice red shirt. (modifies shirt)
The girl with brown hair is singing a song. (modifies girl)
He gave me a glass full of water. (modifies glass)
A boy from America won the race. (modifies boy)
Prepositional phrases and participle phrases also function as adjectives so we
can also call them adjective phrases when they function as adjective. In the
above sentence “The girl with brown hair is singing a song”, the phrase “with
brown hair” is a prepositional phrase but it functions as an adjective.
ADVERB PHRASE
An adverb phrase is a group of words that functions as an adverb in a
sentence. It consists of adverbs or other words (preposition, noun, verb,

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modifiers) that make a group with works like an adverb in a sentence.
An adverb phrase functions like an adverb to modify a verb, an adjective or
another adverb.
Examples
He always behaves in a good manner. (modifies verb behave)
They were shouting in a loud voice. (modifies verb shout)
She always drives with care. (modifies verb drive)
He sat in a corner of the room. (modifies verb sit)
He returned in a short while. (modifies verb return)
A prepositional phrase can also act as an adverb phrase. For example in above
sentence “He always behaves in a good manner”, the phrase “in a good
manner” is a prepositional phrase but it acts as adverb phrase here.
VERB PHRASE
A verb phrase is a combination of main verb and its auxiliaries (helping
verbs) in a sentence.
Examples.
He is eating an apple.
She has finished her work.
You should study for the exam.
She has been sleeping for two hours.
According to generative grammar, a verb phrase can consist of main verb, its
auxiliaries, its complements and other modifiers. Hence it can refer to the
whole predicate of a sentence.
Example. You should study for the exam.
Infinitive Phrase
An infinitive phrase consist of an infinitive(to + simple form of verb) and
modifiers or other words associated to the infinitive. An infinitive phrase always

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functions as an adjective, adverb or a noun in a sentence.
Examples.
He likes to read books. (As noun/object)
To earn money is a desire of everyone. (As noun/subject)
He shouted to inform people about fire. (As adverb, modifies verb
shout)
He made a plan to buy a car. (As adjective, modifies noun
plan)
GERUND PHRASE
A gerund phrase consists of a gerund(verb + ing) and modifiers or other
words associated with the gerund. A gerund phrase acts as a noun in a
sentence.
Examples
I like writing good essays. (As noun/object)
She started thinking about the problem. (As noun/object)
Sleeping late in night is not a good habit. (As noun/subject)
Weeping of a baby woke him up. (As noun/subject)
PARTICIPLE PHRASE
A participle phrase consists of a present participle (verb + ing), a past
participle (verb ending in -ed or other form in case of irregular verbs) and
modifiers or other associate words. A participle phrase is separated by
commas. It always acts as an adjective in a sentence.
Examples
The kids, making a noise, need food. (modifies kids)
I received a letter, mentioning about my exam. (modifies letter)

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The table, made of steel, is too expensive. (modifies table)
We saw a car, damaged in an accident. (modifies car)
ABSOLUTE PHRASE
Absolute phrase (also called nominative phrase) is a group of words
including a noun or pronoun and a participle as well as any associated
modifiers. Absolute phrase modifies (give information about) the entire
sentence. It resembles a clause but it lack a true finite verb. It is separated by a
comma or pairs of commas from the rest sentence.
Examples
He looks sad, his face expressing worry.
She was waiting for her friend, her eyes on the clock.
John is painting a wall, his shirt dirty with paint.
Anonymous, (2014). Types of Phrases. Available at: http://www.stud
yandexam.com/types-of-phrase.html.Retrieved on January 15, 2015.
TYPES OF VERBS
In English, most verbs can be used intransitively, but ordinarily this
does not change the role of the subject; consider, for example, "He ate the
soup" (transitive) and "He ate" (intransitive), where the only difference is that
the latter does not specify what was eaten. By contrast, with an ergative verb
the role of the subject changes; consider "it broke the window" (transitive) and
"the window broke" (intransitive).
Ergative verbs can be divided into several categories:
 Verbs suggesting a change of state — break, burst, form, heal, melt, tear,
transform
 Verbs of cooking — bake, boil, cook, fry
 Verbs of movement — move, shake, sweep, turn, walk
 Verbs involving vehicles — drive, fly, reverse, run, sail

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Some of these can be used intransitively in either sense: "I'm cooking the
pasta" is fairly synonymous with both "The pasta is cooking" (as an ergative
verb) and "I'm cooking", although it obviously gives more information than
either.
Unlike a passive verb, a nominalization, an infinitive, or a gerund, which
would allow the agent to be deleted but would also allow it to be included, the
intransitive version of an ergative verb requires the agent to be deleted:
 "The window was broken" or "The window was broken by the burglar."
 "[…] to break the window […]" or "[…] for the burglar to break the window
[…]"
 "[…] the breaking of the window […]" or "[…] the breaking of the window
by the burglar […]"
 "The window broke" but not *"The window broke by the burglar."
Indeed, the intransitive form of an ergative verb almost suggests that there
is no agent. With some non-ergative verbs, this can be achieved using the
reflexive voice:
 "He solved the problem."
 "The problem was solved" or "The problem was solved by him."
 "The problem solved itself" but not *"The problem solved itself by him."
In this case, however, the use of the reflexive voice strongly indicates the
lack of an agent; where "John broke the window, or maybe Jack did — at any
rate, the window broke" is understandable, if slightly unidiomatic, *"John
solved the problem, or maybe Jack did — at any rate, the problem solved itself"
is completely self-contradictory. Nonetheless, some grammarians would
consider both "The window broke" and "The problem solved itself" to be
examples of a distinct voice, the middle voice.
A particularly odd English ergative verb is "graduate": "he graduated from
school" and "school graduated him" mean the same thing, although the latter
usage has passed out of vogue, and one meets with occasional criticism of the

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intransitive form.[1] With the latter usage, the verb is transitive, but with the
former, the verb is intransitive.
The significance of the ergative verb is that it enables a writer or speaker not
only to suppress the identity of the outside agent responsible for the particular
process, but also to represent the affected party as in some way causing the
action by which it is affected. This can be done neutrally when the affected
party can be considered an institution or corporate entity and the individual
member responsible for the action is unimportant, for example "the shop
closed for the day". It can also be used by journalists sympathetic to a
particular causative agent and wishing to avoid assigning blame, as in "Eight
factories have closed this year."
Anonymous, (2014). Ergative Verb. Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Intransitive_verb. Retrieved on January 15, 2015.
Intransitive verb does not allow an object.[1] This is distinct from a
transitive verb, which takes one or more objects. The verb property is called
transitivity.
Examples
In the following sentences, verbs are used without direct object:
 "I sneezed."
 "My dog ran."
 "When he finished the race, he barfed."
 "Water evaporates when it's hot."
 "You've grown since I last saw you!"
The following sentences contain transitive verbs (they take one or more
objects):
 "We watcheda movie last night."
 "She's eatingpopcorn."
 "When I said that, my sister smackedme."
 "Santa gavemea present."

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Some verbs allow for objects but do not always require one. In other words, a
verb may be used as intransitive in one sentence, and as transitive in another:
Intransitive Transitive
"It's raining." "It's rainingcats and dogs."
"When he finished the race, he
barfed."
"When he finished the race, he barfed
uphis lunch."
"Water evaporates when it's
hot."
"Heat evaporateswater."
"He's been singing all day." "He's been singingbarbershop all day."
"You've grown since I last saw
you."
"You've growna beard since I last saw
you!"
In general, intransitive verbs often involve weather terms, involuntary
processes, states, bodily functions, motion, action processes, cognition,
sensation, and emotion.[2]:54-61
Valency-changing operations
The valency of a verb is related to transitivity. Where the transitivity of a
verb only considers the objects, the valency of a verb considers all the
arguments the verb takes, including both the subject of the verb and all of the
objects (of which there are none for an intransitive verb).
It is possible to change the transitivity of a verb, and in so doing to change the
valency.
In languages that have a passive voice, a transitive verb in the active voice
becomes intransitive in the passive voice. For example, consider the following
sentence:
David hugged Mary.
In this sentence, "hugged" is a transitive verb taking "Mary" as its object. The
sentence can be made passive with the direct object "Mary" as the grammatical
subject as follows:
Mary was hugged.
This shift is called promotion of the object.

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The passive-voice construction cannot take an object. The passivized sentence
could be continued with the agent:
Mary was hugged by David.
It cannot be continued with a direct object to be taken by "was hugged."
For example, it would be ungrammatical to write "Mary was hugged her
daughter" in order to show that Mary and her daughter shared a hug.
Intransitive verbs can be made passive in some languages. In English,
intransitive verbs can be used in the passive voice when a prepositional phrase
is included, as in, "The houses were lived in by millions of people."
Some languages, such as Dutch, have an impersonal passive voice that
allows an intransitive verb which does not have a prepositional phrase to be
made passive. In German, a sentence such as "The children sleep" can be made
passive to remove the subject and will become "It is slept". However, no
addition like "...by the children" is possible in such cases.
In languages with ergative–absolutivealignment, the passive voice (where the
object of a transitive verb becomes the subject of an intransitive verb) does not
make sense, because the noun associated with the intransitive verb is marked
as the object, not as the subject. Instead, these often have an antipassive voice.
In this context, the subject of a transitive verb is promoted to the "object" of the
corresponding intransitive verb. In the context of a nominative–accusative
language like English, this promotion is nonsensical because intransitive verbs
don't take objects, they take subjects, and so the subject of a transitive verb ("I"
in I hug him) is also the subject of the intransitive passive construction (I was
hugged by him). But in an ergative–absolutive language like Dyirbal, "I" in the
transitive I hug him would take the ergative case, but the "I" in I was hugged
would take the absolutive, and so by analogy the antipassive construction more
closely resembles *was hugged me. Thus in this example, the ergative is
promoted to the absolutive, and the agent (i.e. him), which was formerly
marked by the absolutive, is deleted to form the antipassive voice (or is marked
in a different way, in the same way that in the English passive voice can still be

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specified as the agent of the action using by him in I was hugged by him—for
example, Dyirbal puts the agent in the dative case, and Basque retains the
agent in the absolutive).
Ambitransitivity
In many languages, there are "ambitransitive" verbs, which can be either
transitive or intransitive. For example, English play is ambitransitive (both
intransitive and transitive), since it is grammatical to say His son plays, and it
is also grammatical to say His son plays guitar. English is rather flexible with
regards to verb valency, and so it has a high number of ambitransitive verbs;
other languages are more rigid and require explicit valency changing operations
(voice, causative morphology, etc.) to transform a verb from intransitive to
transitive or vice versa.
In some ambitransitive verbs, called ergative verbs, the alignment of the
syntactic arguments to the semantic roles is exchanged. An example of this is
the verb break in English.
(1) He broke the cup.
(2) The cup broke.
In (1), the verb is transitive, and the subject is the agent of the action, i.e. the
performer of the action of breaking the cup. In (2), the verb is intransitive and
the subject is the patient of the action, i.e. it is the thing affected by the action,
not the one that performs it. In fact, the patient is the same in both sentences,
and sentence (2) is an example of implicit middle voice. This has also been
termed an anticausative.
Other alternating intransitive verbs in English are change and sink.
Unaccusative and unergative verbs
Main articles: Unaccusative verb and Unergative verb
Especially in some languages, it makes sense to classify intransitive verbs as:
 unaccusative when the subject is not an agent; that is, it does not
actively initiate the action of the verb (e.g. "die", "fall").
 unergative when they have an agent subject (e.g. "run", "talk", "resign").

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This distinction may in some cases be reflected in the grammar, where for
instance different auxiliary verbs may be used for the two categories.
Cognate objects
Main article: Cognate object
In many languages, including English, some or all intransitive verbs can take
cognate objects—objects formed from the same roots as the verbs themselves;
for example, the verb sleep is ordinarily intransitive, but one can say, "He slept
a troubled sleep", meaning roughly "He slept, and his sleep was troubled."
Anonymous, (2014). Intransitive Verb.Available at: http://en.wikipedia
.org/wiki/Intransitive_verb. Retrieved on January 15, 2015.
DITRANSITIVE VERB
n grammar, a ditransitive verb is a verb which takes a subject and two
objects which refer to a theme and a recipient. According to certain linguistics
considerations, these objects may be called direct and indirect, or primary and
secondary. This is in contrast to monotransitive verbs, which take only one
object, a direct or primary object.
In languages which mark grammatical case, it is common to differentiate the
objects of a ditransitive verb using, for example, the accusative case for the
direct object, and the dative case for the indirect object (but this morphological
alignment is not unique; see below). In languages without morphological case
(such as English for the most part) the objects are distinguished by word order
and/or context.
English usage
English has a number of generally ditransitive verbs, such as give, grant,
and tell and many transitive verbs that can take an additional argument
(commonly a beneficiary or target of the action), such as pass, read, bake, etc.:
He gave Mary ten dollars.

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He passed Paul the ball.
Jean read him the books.
She is baking him a cake.
I am mailing Sam some lemons.
English grammar allows for these sentences to be written alternately with
a preposition (to or for):
He gave ten dollars to Mary.
He passed the ball to Paul.
Jean read the books to/for him.
She is baking a cake for him.
I am mailing some lemons to Sam., etc.
The latter form is grammatically correct in every case, but in some
dialects the former (without a preposition) is considered ungrammatical, or at
least unnatural-sounding, when both objects are pronouns (as in He gave me
it).
Sometimes one of the forms is perceived as wrong for idiosyncratic reasons
(idioms tend to be fixed in form) or the verb simply dictates one of the patterns
and excludes the other:
*Give a break to me (grammatical, but always phrased Give me a break)
*He introduced Susan his brother (usually phrased He introduced his
brother to Susan)
In certain dialects of English, many verbs not normally treated as ditransitive
are allowed to take a second object that shows a beneficiary, generally of an
action performed for oneself.
Let's catch us some fish (which might also be phrased Let's catch some
fish for ourselves[citation needed])
This construction could also be an extension of a reflexive construction.
In addition, certain ditransitive verbs can also act as monotransitive verbs:[1]
"David told the children a story" - Ditransitive
"David told a story - Monotransitive

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Passive voice
Many ditransitive verbs have a passive voice form which can take a direct
object. Contrast the active and two forms of the passive:
Active:
Jean gave the books to him.
Jean gave him the books.
Passive:
The books were given to him by Jean.
He was given the books by Jean.
Not all languages have a passive voice, and some that do have one (e.g. Polish)
don't allow the indirect object of a ditransitive verb to be promoted to subject
by passivization, as English does. In others like Dutch a passivization is
possible but requires a different auxiliary: "krijgen" instead of "worden".
E.g. schenken means "to donate, to give":
Active: Jan schonk hem de boeken - John donated the books to him.
Passive: De boeken werden door Jan aan hem geschonken.
Pseudo-passive: Hij kreeg de boeken door Jan geschonken.
Attributive ditransitive verbs
There is a different kind of ditransitive verb, where the two objects are
semantically an entity and a quality, a source and a result, etc. These verbs
attribute one object to the other. In English, make, name, appoint, turn into and
others are examples:
 The state of New York made Hillary Clinton a Senator.
 I will name him Galahad.
Ditransitive/monotransitive alignment
Just as the way the arguments of intransitive and transitive verbs are aligned
in a given language allows one sort of typological classification, the
morphosyntactic alignment between arguments of monotransitive and
ditransitive verbs allows another kind of classification. If the three arguments
of a typical ditransitive verb are labeled D (for Donor; the subject of a verb like

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"to give" in English), T (for Theme; normally the direct object of ditransitive verb
in English) and R (for Recipient, normally the indirect object in English), these
can be aligned with the Agent and Patient of monotransitive verbs and the
Subject of intransitive verbs in several ways, which are not predicted by
whether the language is accusative, ergative, or active. Donor is always or
nearly always in the same case as Agent, but different languages equate the
other arguments in different ways:
 Indirective languages: D = A, T = P, with a third case for R
 Secundative or dechticaetiative languages: D = A, R = P, with a third
case for T
 Split-P languages: D = A, some monotransitive clauses have P = T,
others have P = R
Anonymous, (2014). Intransitive Verb.Available at: http://en.wikipedia
.org/wiki/Intransitive_verb. Retrieved on January 15, 2015.
Categorization of Verbs According to Chalker (1984)
There are six types:
1. Intransitive verbs, which take no following object:Mavis smokes.
2. Transitive verbs, which require an object, Dougraises llamas.
3. Ditransitive verbs, which take two objects (indirect and direct):I handed Flo
the fax.
4. Linking verbs, where what follows the verb relates back to the subject:
We are teachers. Complex
5. Transitive verbs,where what follows the object relates to the object:
They considered the project a waste of time.
6. Prepositional Verbs,which require a prepositional phrase to be
complete:Steve glanced
Anonymous, (2014). Grammatical Metalanguage. Available at: http://www.u
ibk.ac.at/anglistik/staff/freeman/course-documents/chapter-2.pdfRetrieved
on January 15, 2015.

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Types of phrases

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